{"id":171745,"date":"2026-02-22T08:30:25","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T13:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=171745"},"modified":"2026-02-21T13:29:40","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T18:29:40","slug":"david-foster-wallace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=171745","title":{"rendered":"\u201cEverything I\u2019ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.\u201d — David Foster Wallace"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n“Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” — David Foster Wallace<\/big><\/p>\n

It’s his birthday today. <\/p>\n

David Foster Wallace is hard to talk about. It’s painful. I say this as someone who did not know him, or have him in my life even in a peripheral way. I know a couple people who knew him\/worked with him, in varying degrees of intimacy, and the anguish they feel is beyond words, so to talk about my pain as a reader\/fan compared to the people who knew him makes me feel a little weird. But as a reader it’s hard not to get the feeling that something irreplaceable has been lost. He spawned many imitators. His writing was extremely commanding. He made huge demands on the reader. You must submit to his footnotes. They aren’t an interruption. They are the whole shebang. Stop trying to “get back” to the “main throughline”. There is no such thing. <\/p>\n

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\nI did not read Infinite Jest<\/i> when it came out. I bought it but there it sat on my bookshelves, all 1200 pages of it, unread for years. Who the hell has the time for that? I didn’t even know what it was about, beyond something having to do with twelve-step recovery. Soooo THAT sounds like a barrel of laughs. I read his essays when I’d come across them, and then bought the collections.<\/p>\n

But finally I read Infinite Jest<\/i>. And, as so often happens, I discovered for myself what all the fuss was about. Poor Jonathan Franzen. Being Jonathan Franzen must be like Bing Crosby’s possibly apocryphal comment: “Frank Sinatra has a voice that comes along once in a generation, but why oh why did it have to come in mine?”<\/p>\n

I want to point you to a really important piece by Christian Lorentzen, where he discusses DFW’s commencement speech that “went viral”, with all its pat little sayings of inspiration, and how this has made him a little bit more palatable to the mainstream. The commencement speech, though, is almost a false flag. It’s ANTI what DFW was normally about. Lorentzen’s piece is about who owns an artist’s legacy after they’re gone? The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I consider DFW’s piece on David Lynch’s Lost Highway<\/i> to be one of the best pieces of film criticism in the whole genre. It opened up possibilities for others: OH! We don’t have to do it like everybody else does it! We can write like THIS? Of course, we CAN’T “write like this” but his example still inspires. <\/p>\n

Writing about books isn’t so much my thing anymore, but I had so much fun writing about Infinite Jest<\/i>, and how Infinite Jest<\/i> illuminated something for me about Marlon Brando – and I have spent decades pondering Marlon Brando – but Infinite Jest<\/i> gave me an A-ha moment. A sort of, “My GOD, yes, that’s IT EXACTLY.” <\/p>\n

So I wrote about Infinite Jest<\/i> and Marlon Brando<\/a> for Film Comment.<\/p>\n

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\nThank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account<\/a>. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0<\/a>, if you’d like to subscribe.<\/em> <\/small><\/p>\n